Deer in the Headlights to Discernment: Decision-Making in Difficult Times
It’s one of life’s longstanding ironies that the times we are forced to make difficult decisions is when we’re the least equipped to make them. From challenging transitions like moving homes or jobs, to bigger losses like break-ups and divorce to the ultimate loss of a loved one, we’re forced to make choices that impact our future at a time when we feel overwhelmed and sometimes, frankly, broken.
For the purposes of this post, let’s use the end of a long tern relationship as an example. Going through a divorce isn’t just about the loss of a relationship: in many cases it means the loss of an identity, of a vision for the future and the loss what it means to be a family. And that’s in the best-case scenario, when both partners agree that separating is for the best. If the break-up wasn’t your choice but your partner’s, this loss is exacerbated by a feeling of lack of agency, like you’ve been swept off your feet by a cyclone and don’t know which way is up and which way is down anymore. The future you envisioned is crashing all around you and you’re left standing there like a deer in the headlights.
Yet in the midst of this Churn with a capital C, practical decisions that’ll have a real impact for your future need to be made. Who moves out? Do you sell the family house or buy out your partner? Who pays who child support? Spousal support? How will you co-parent? Heck, will you remain in each other’s lives or not? How do you support your children through the Churn while you’re in it yourself?
Though I’m almost a decade out of my marriage, I can still feel the shell shock of that time, how raw I felt, like I’d been emotional flayed alive (excuse the graphic metaphor, but if you’ve been there, you know). You feel stretched thin, tender like an open wound. Making the practical decisions for the future of my children and myself without Pain and Longing making the decisions for me was very challenging. I am not sure I completely succeeded.
Check-In
· Do you find yourself in a deer-in-the-headlights situation? Take a second to plant your feet on the ground and breathe. What emotions are at the forefront? Are you able to stay with them? Are they paralysing you? Or do you avoid them by keeping busy or maybe through an extra glass of wine at night?
· Invitation: take a couple of minutes to stop what you’re doing. Close your eyes. Take a long breath in through the nose and exhale out through the mouth. Do that a couple of times. Then focus on your feet on the ground. Pay attention to how the floor is holding you up. Feel the weight of gravity keeping you anchored to this earth. If you’re seated, feel your butt in the chair, how the chair is holding you up. Keep breathing, feeling yourself held up by the chair, the ground, wherever you find yourself. Remind yourself that right now at this moment you are safe.
Fight, Flight, Freeze or Appease: In the Present but not in a Good Way
Chances are you already know what happens to your body when you’re stressed, but I think it’s worth a reminder.
What goes up:
· First of all, adrenaline. Which then causes increased
o Heart rate
o Blood pressure
o Rate of breath (breathing more rapidly)
o Oxygen in the lungs and brain
o Glucose and fats in the bloodstream (for energy)
o Cortisol
If the stress cycle isn’t completed, cortisol keeps on getting produced at the expense of other important body systems.
In the case of prolonged stress responses, here’s what goes down:
· Body wellness and mobility (more aches and pains)
· Sleep
· Digestive functioning
· Immune system
· Mental state (more anxiety, depression, panic attacks, etc.)
Fun, hey? No wonder making decisions can feel so hard.
How to Make decisions in Difficult Times
1. Learn to Sit in Uncertainty
“The Future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think.” Virginia Woolf.
Part of growing up is going through the process of shedding the childhood illusions that allowed us to develop our own identities, to separate from our parents and become our own person. We need the illusion that the world makes sense, that there is always a direct correlation between our behaviour and our outcomes as we begin our journey into adulthood. It provides us a useful map for growing up. But that illusion begins to crumble as we grapple with the increasing complexity and nuance of our human experience. As we get older, we’re called (sometimes rather shrilly) to shed the illusion and embrace the fact that sometimes nothing makes sense and we know very little and no matter what we do or say or be, things will sometimes be out of our control and go to shit.
I know. That’s a hard lesson. All you can do is sit with it, and surrender to the reality that life, lik humanity, is rarely rational.
2. Slow it down. Slow it way, way down
“For fast-acting relief try slowing down.” Lily Tomlin
When you can sit in uncertainty for a while, you can consciously slow down the process. Everyone will try to convince you a response is urgent. Heck, that’s what the best scams do— they make you believe your grand-child is in danger and the only way to help them is by sending $5000 RIGHT NOW. They manipulate the fact that when we’re in crisis mode we’re only using system 1 thinking—that is automatic, survival mode thinking. There’s a crisisà I need to fix ità they have told me how to fix ità I will do this to stop the panic from flooding me. No other solution presents themselves because we are flooded.
If you’re receiving texts from your ex, or even worse, emails from lawyers and official sounding letters, it can feel really scary. The temptation to give an answer just to make the fear and anxiety go away is real.
Before you respond, put the phone down or shut off the computer. Close your eyes. Take some deep breaths in through the nose and out through the mouth. Then give yourself the gift of time. Acknowledge the receipt of the correspondence and let them know you’ll get back to them when you’ve had time to formulate a true response, not just a reaction. That way they know what to expect, and you can give yourself time to respond in a way that is aligned with your values.
3. What are your Core Values?
“The decisions you make are a choice of values that reflect your life in every way.” Alice Waters
Of course, to respond in a way aligned with your values, you have to know what those are. This is an important exercise to do when you’re going through major life transitions, as they will help guide decisions.
For example, one of my values is creativity. I like to write. It’s how I process the world. This value guided me as I launched my private practice because I wanted writing to be a key part of how I do my job. That means I leave a couple of hours at the beginning of the day for creative work.
Testing your options against your core values will help guide you towards a future that’s more aligned with who you are and where you want to be when you get out of the Churn. Here are some tools you can use to help you figure them out. Try to whittle them down to between 3 to 5.
Valuescardsort.com: They have the look and feel of a real card deck! It’s really easy to use—just drag and drop the card in the category that is appropriate and save the results.
Values Card Sort : This is a user-friendly card sort from leadership coaching and consulting group, Think2Perform. I am not affiliated with this group at all—I just like how easy they have made it to do the values card sort online.
Brené Brown’s Living into Our Values: To go a little deeper, take two of your core values and see how they manifest in your behaviour. Is your behaviour aligned with your values? If not, why not? Be curious—that misalignment may be the cause of some of your distress.
Slowing it down, sitting in uncertainty and giving yourself the time to reflect on whether a decision is grounded in your values is an effective way of reclaiming your agency and empowering you as you take steps towards a better future.
4. How do you want to feel?
“The limits of my language means the limits of my world.” Ludwig Wittgenstein
We don’t know what the future is going to look like. As we mentioned above, there’s a lot we don’t control in this world. But what is within our control is to be mindful of our actions and make intentional decisions based on what we value and how we want to feel in our lives.
A common mistake we make is to focus on the details of our longing. Think about how you envisioned being an adult when you were a child: I’m going to be a lawyer and wear high heels and marry a tall, handsome man and live in a big old house and have two kids and… or insert your own childhood version of being grown up.
Our lives rarely end up looking the way we think they’re going to look. Even when they do, we’ve spent so much time on getting the details right that when we’ve achieved all those things, it feels empty and unsatisfying. We were so busy ticking the boxes off our life to-do list that we forgot to ask ourselves how we want to feel. We didn’t name or clarify our aspirational state of being. Do you want to feel fulfilled? Calm? At peace? Secure? How do these feelings correspond with your values?
Questions for your Consideration:
· How does it feel when you’re living a life aligned with your values?
· How does it feel when your behaviour is not aligned with your core values?
· How do you want to feel in this next phase of your life?
· Do you sometimes feel those feelings now? If so, when? If not, what is blocking you?
Take a minute to think about it. Write down your answer or make a drawing. Get creative!
If you have the inclination, making a vision board on how you want to feel in this next phase of your life can be a very powerful tool. There is some real science behind the idea of manifestation, but the way I understand it is that when you take the time to clarify the state of being you aspire to and display it in a concrete, visual way, that vision influences all the micro and macro decisions you make and thus leads you closer to that state. Think of it as a north star guiding you towards your next destination.
But Isn’t basing my life on how I want to feel kind of Selfish?
NO. Trust me when I say that living your life aligned with your values and how you want to feel means that you are giving yourself the best chance to be your best self. And your best self is what makes the world better, what makes you a better partner, parent, friend, sibling. It is when we are misaligned and hustling for our worth where we cause the most harm.
Conclusion
“Life is hard. After all, it kills you.” Katharine Hepburn
Nobody said this was going to be easy. But what I’ve learned about difficult times is that they’re very good at separating the wheat from the chaff: these moments provide visceral lessons about what is not working for us in our life (even if we are clinging to the illusion that they are). Leaning into them, slowing it down, reflecting on how you want to be in the world is how we take the lemons and make lemonade. In short, difficult times are what compels us to grow up and take ownership of our lives.
References
System 1 Vs System 2 Thinking
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Health Info
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/11874-stress
https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/understanding-the-stress-response
